This module gives students the opportunity to examine the achievement of Wales’s greatest – and most unsettling – poetic voice of the second half of the twentieth century: Cardiff-born R. S. Thomas. For some a national icon, for others a stern mapper of‘the differences between us’, Thomas continues to divide opinion. Students will assess the full span of the priest-poet’s career, from the early anti-pastoral lyrics to the pared-down notes of the great metaphysical poetry. The module evaluates the dramatic ways in which Thomas redefined the genetics of ‘religious’, ‘devotional’ and ‘spiritual’ poetry, confronting orthodox belief with the dislocations, discoveries and terrors of (post)modernity. The module also invites students to  consider whether Thomas’s poetry harmonises with his often strident comments on national identity and his country’s cultural divisions. The module is delivered within a dual frame: one chronological and (auto)biographical, the other thematic – so as to equip students with a critical awareness of Thomas’s major preoccupations, the phases of his career, and its underlying unities.

Discuss critically a range of R. S. Thomas’s poetic and prose texts in the context of his career as a whole.

Identify and evaluate Thomas’s major poetic preoccupations and analyse the ways in which his engagement with those themes develops throughout his oeuvre.

Demonstrate an awareness of the social, political and cultural contexts in which Thomas’s work was produced.

Demonstrate an awareness of the (auto-)biographical contexts of Thomas’s poetry and prose.

The module will be delivered by means of one 1-hour lecture and 1 2-hour seminar a week. Detailed handouts will prompt students’ engagements with crucial aspects of R. S. Thomas’s works. The two lectures will outline the major conceptual issues at stake and take the opportunity to offer close readings of individual constellations of poems. Powerpoint is central to the delivery of this module (both lectures and seminars.

By asking students to engage in evaluative scrutiny of literary texts, and to formulate and sustain a detailed argument, the module develops stringent analytical skills. By asking students to relate literary texts to various cultural-historical and biographical contexts,to engage in independent reading and investigation, and to synthesise information in a conceptualised argument, the module develops crucial research skills. By requiring students to evaluate broad intellectual concepts, and to reflect critically on their own historical/critical/theoretical approaches to literary texts, the module develops subject-specific skills that are also transferrable in the context of their professional and personal development.

The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide. There are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

1. ‘Am I Not Wounded?’: R. S. Thomas and Cultural ‘Hurt’

Thomas’s often dramatic articulations of his ‘hyphenated’ cultural identity will be considered: ‘Abercuawg’, ‘The Creative Writer’s Suicide’ and Cymru or Wales?, together with selections from the poetry. These will be read in the context of wider debates concerning the tensions of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ identity. The session will also calibrate broad ‘constructions’ of Thomas, taken from charged retrospectives and anniversary assessments. The rest of the module will subject the personae thereby revealed to detailed scrutiny.

2. The ‘Gut’s Trouble’: Autobiographies

A consideration of Thomas’s shifting, ironic, often playful dramatisations of the self, focusing on his prose autobiographies and on his highly innovative take on life-writing, The Echoes Return Slow (1988).

3. ‘Bald Welsh Hills’: Prytherch Country

Border writing, frontierland (anti-)lyrics, and alter-egos: the poetry of the Manafon period(1942–54) leading up to Song at the Year’s Turning (1955).

4. State of the Nation

This session focuses on Thomas’s poetry of nationalist valency and his embittered dramatisations of Welsh identities – actual and ideal – in the volumes Poetry for Supper (1958), Tares (1961), The Bread of Truth (1963), Pietà (1966) and Not That He Brought Flowers (1968).

5. God and the Machine

From 1967, at Aberdaron on the Llŷn peninsula, Thomas pushed his theological speculation and his search for the ‘absent god’  into disconcerting new territories. This session will focus on the mythopoeic terror of H’m (1972), alongside the volume that in many ways served as a template for Thomas’s disturbing new creation myth: Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970).

Reading Week

6. The Biochemical God

This session explores Thomas’s post-Christian universe, his poetry of space-time and cosmic radiation, in the volumes Laboratories of the Spirit (1975), The Way of It (1977) and Frequencies (1978). 

7. ‘Why had he made her so?’: R. S. Thomas and the Female

Gender and sexuality in Thomas’s poetry, with a particular focus on engagements with ‘the female’ in the two volumes in which Thomas interrogates paintings: Between Here and Now(1981) and Ingrowing Thoughts (1985).

8. ‘Love’s Fire’: Poems to Elsi

This sesson considers Thomas’s achievement as an acute, unforgiving and diaphanous poet of married and of family life; and as a love poet and elegist.

9. Companion Poets

In focus here are Thomas’s debts to and dialogues with other poets, including Yeats (and Ireland as a powerful paradigm) and twentieth-century American verse.

10. R. S. Thomas: Editor

This session will examine the significance of Thomas’s editorial choices as compiler of anthologies and of collections of others’ work.

Note: A comprehensive, thematic module bibliography will be provided at the start of the module.

Primary/Set Texts

R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (Dent, 2000)

ISBN: 9780753811054

------------------, Collected Later Poems, 1988–2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004)

ISBN: 9781852246488

--------------------, Uncollected Poems, ed. Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies (Bloodaxe Books, 2013)

ISBN: 9781852248963

--------------------, Poems to Elsi, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Seren, 2013)

Indicative Secondary Texts

The most comprehensive critical bibliography of R. S. Thomas is the Oxford Bibliographies Online resource (access through library e-resources).

Anstey, Sandra (ed.), Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas,  2^nd rev. edn (Seren, 1992)

Brown, Tony, ‘“Eve’s Ruse”: Identity and Gender in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas’, English, 49.195 (2000), 229–250

------------------, ‘“Love’s Depths”: R. S. Thomas’s Poems to His Wife’, Renascence. 60.2 (Winter 2008), 132–160

----------------, R. S. Thomas (University of Wales Press, 2013)

Dafydd, Fflur, ‘“There Were Fathoms in Her Too”: R. S. Thomas and Women’, Renascence , 60.2 (Winter 2008), 118–131

Davis, William V. (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas (University of Arkansas Press, 1993)

Dyson, A. E., ‘The Poetry of R. S. Thomas: What Resource?’, in Yeats, Eliot and R. S. Thomas: Riding the Echo (Macmillan, 1981), 285–326

Lethbridge, J.,  ‘R. S. Thomas Talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 74 (1983), 36–56

Morgan, Christopher, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, Deity (Manchester University Press, 2003)

Phillips, D. Z, R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God: Meaning and Mediation in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Macmillan, 1986)

Rogers, Byron, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas (Aurum, 2006)

Shepherd, Elaine, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence – Images of God Explored (Macmillan, 1996)

Thomas, M. Wynn, ‘R. S. Thomas: The Poetry of the Sixties’, inInternal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-century Wales (University of Wales Press, 1992),107–129

------------------------, R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (University of Wales Press, 2013)

-----------------------------, (ed.),The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty (Seren, 1993)

Walford Davies, Damian (ed.), Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R. S. Thomas, 2^nd imp. (University of Wales Press, 2009)

Walford Davies, Jason, ‘Allusions to Welsh Literature in the Work of R. S. Thomas’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 1 (1995), 75–127

-------------------------------, (trans. and ed.), R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (Dent, 1997)

Westover, Daniel, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (Cardiff, 2011)

Wintle, Justin, Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (HarperCollins, 1996)

Audio

R. S. Thomas Reading The Poems. Sain Records, SCD 2209 and C 2209 (1999). Triple-CD recording of Thomas reading 150 poems spanning the full career.